Free Tools

This forum is for discussing and recommending Free tools for software development. Please post direct links to tools, and not just links to pages that review or list tools.No shareware and no commercial products allowed. Please report spammers by voting to remove their messages and reporting their accounts.

psake is a build automation tool written in PowerShell. It avoids the angle-bracket tax associated with executable XML by leveraging the PowerShell syntax in your build scripts. psake has a syntax inspired by rake (aka make in Ruby) and bake (aka make in Boo), but is easier to script because it leverages your existent command-line knowledge.

psake is pronounced sake – as in Japanese rice wine. It does NOT rhyme with make, bake, or rake.

The Registry is increasingly becomming the 'Dark Part' of the computer, a part that is poorly understood. I hail back to the old DOS 3.1 days. DOS did not have a registry, it had an 'environment' This was very rudimentary. (DOS was also a Single User, Single thread efford). This DOS 'Environment', was once described as 'A Wall to write grafiti on', and, that was a true statement. The point was, that whatever was written there would be largely ignored by each and every program, until a program found a piece of information it was looking for.

Manually Adding a piece of information to the registry can never cause a problem, unless there is an application, which when running, queeries the added entry.

Redundant Registry entries cannot slow down a computer. This even applies to so called redundant 'COM' Links in the registry. The whole subject is becomming worthy of an 'Article'.

Hi all,
(I apparently put this in wrong forum the first time, sorry for the double post.)

I just wanted to share a tool I recently developed. Over the years I've gotten so sick of manually building concatenated strings and / or Stingbuilder objects from queries and other blocks of text. Last week I created a tool that automatically generates concatenated strings and Stringbuilder code from blocks of text.

Correct which is why there is also an option to build a concatenated string instead of a Stringbuilder. It's to automate all the escaping of quotes and backslashes more than anything which has annoyed me over the years.

great tool.
Just a small hiccup. If i put a semicolon at the end of text , your program should remove it first and then convert it to string .
for example i wrote this.
select * from table where abc = 'wah wah';

I downloaded the free WiNToBootTic utility [^], and it works very well: I had a bootable 32 gig USB flash drive with a Win 8 RTM Trial ISO on it in a very short time.

I really like simple tools that do one thing well. Click once to make the drive you selected formatted; confirm permission to format; after formatting: drag-drop an ISO file into the zone in the WiNToBootTic UI designed for same: ba-boom. It just works.

Changing the BIOS to boot off that flash drive was simple: and then it was fun to wait for Win 8 to take about eleven minutes to put up the "install" initial dialog. Contrary to MS's claim that this 90 trial version required no software key, it would not install, but that's just what "normal" is these days in terms of my experience with all Windows software

I read about WiNToBootTic on How-To-Geek, which is running an article on a gaggle of free tools for creating bootable flash-drives (and other hard drives) for Windows 7/8, Linux, etc [^].

My name is George Delaportas and I am an entrepreneur in new technologies and especially on the Internet.
I have a brilliant idea which I hope it will be the next big step for Web 3.0 and the unification of the services and apps on the Internet over the cloud since our era is near to the utilization of the Thin-Client scheme almost for every device.

In general the idea is an abstract and unified but very simple programming meta-language and framework which is not really compiled on its own syntax but it's being converted to other languages on-demand over the cloud. This way you will have only one universal "language", like English, and converters on the cloud - on the software vendor's side -
to parse and compile according to the infrastructure needs.
For example, an app for iPhone coded in ALPHA Script would be instantly deployed and available in any other O/S and device like a smart-phone, tablet, etc in minutes and would also be available on other clouds like Amazon EC2, Google, Azure except from the iCloud!
The intercommunication among the different clouds could be formed in SOAP with XML or JSON.

In any case the unification of the diversity of so many different technologies by providing a virtual bridge could finally lead to the: "Code Once, Deploy Anywhere" era.
In other words developers can code in ALPHA Script or in their favorite language but the vendors can convert on the server side (cloud) their app in ALPHA Script and distribute them to all the other clouds.
This mechanism will give unlimited options for rapid development and instant deployment for different applications which would be
useful to the new era of Thin and non Thin Clients.
ALPHA Script is also very useful for M2M Communications.

Finally the ALPHA Script is an open source project and I work with effort to make a team of experts
to "forge" a global consortium like W3C that each software vendor will provide responses upon requests for the
addition of new features and extension of this abstract unified meta-language.

ALPHA Script is a free and open source programming model and the software from this project will be publicly open and free for everyone.

I ask for contributors and I want to start a team of innovative young people who will join me on this.

Please, before using any tool like this, create a Windows Restore Point, so you can "get back to where you belong," as the Beatles' sang

I am aware that there are strong opinions/disagreements about whether one should ever use software for registry defragmentation, or cleaning. I suggest you research those opinions, and make your own decision very carefully. [^] [^]

For example, I was told by one of the MS MVP's on the MSSE forum that my sudden inability to update MSSE was the result of "use of CCleaner's Registry clean feature," even before, I believe, he had fully understood what I was talking about, or had examined the error reports, and screen-shots, I sent.

I had gone back and forth with the nice people on the MS Visual Studio install forum, used their tools for analysis (which are very old), and did not find their advice solved the problem. I'll spare you the bloody details.

fyi: I took a Visual Studio 2012 RTM Windows-Forms .exe (compiled against FrameWork 4.5 RTM), launched it, and it ran, presenting a Form on the Screen. I find that strange, since I had unsuccessfully attempted to uninstall FrameWork 4.5.

If it didn't use any API's from .Net 4.5 then it doesn't surprise me that the exe ran.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. AdamsYou must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von BraunOnly two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein

Good point to raise: whether a simple "vanilla" test of a WinForms project compiled against FrameWork 4.5 in VS 2012, with the default libraries referenced, does, or does not, make use of FrameWork 4.5 versions of Generics and such: just by virtue of the fact they are referenced, and appear as "using ..." statements in the Form.cs file.

Not quite sure if this really should go here, since it's a blog entry, not free software, but I found it quite useful information, and interesting, and don't know where else on CP it would be better to post. I'm sure our friendly moderators will delete it, if it's inappropriate, here.